Pat Streeter, Vice President of Park Plaza Cooperative, provides experienced insight into the benefits of becoming a resident owned community. Park Plaza became resident-owned in 2011 and has since completed over $1 million in infrastructure improvements including a complete overhaul of the community’s water and storm sewer systems.

[Editor's note: The following is the latest backgrounder from Food First's Dismantling Racism in the Food System series. It is excerpted from a section on Black Agrarianism included in 2017’s forthcoming book Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons. GEO thanks the authors and Food First for allowing us to share their work.]

Author Craig Willse and organizer Imani Henry discuss housing, homelessness and the role of nonprofits in change-making (or not). Plus, an exclusive report from an upstate New York farm that's feeding people while fighting the school-to-prison pipeline. All that and Laura, inspired by Detroit's teachers, wonders when we’ll be ready for a grand national sick out.

The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to participate in decisions about that resource’s use.

There is a very interesting development coming out of the UK and Western Europe. A network of folks over there are working hard on developing a framework for the convergence of co-operative, commons, solidarity, open source, and all the alternative economic movements.

[Editor's note: this report by Pat Conaty and David Bollier presents an in-depth look at the how our often disparate movements might begin to work together more closely in order to create a more just, open and equitable economy. David Bollier describes the scope of the report on Shareable:

[Editor's note: In this presentation from The Sustainable Economies Law Center's 5th Annual Fall Celebration, SELC's staff presents a comprehensive vision of a Cooperative Economic future and, more importantly, lays out concrete steps that can be taken in order to arrive there. As an additional bonus, the presentation is creative and entertaining. Enjoy! (The show starts at 1:50 and runs until 35:52)]

Editor's note:Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize in Economics for her work on "common pool resources," was born on August 7, 1933. In order to mark the occassion, and to celebrate the life and accomplishments of this great woman, we present four videos of Elinor explaining the fundamentals and implications of her research. Though we lost Elinor in 2012, her work and her